Posted
by
timothy
on Thursday September 26, 2013 @07:47AM
from the blacklist-provided-by-democracy dept.

nk497 writes "If Google can block child abuse images, it can also block piracy sites, according to a report from MPs, who said they were 'unimpressed' by Google's 'derisorily ineffective' efforts to battle online piracy, according to a Commons Select Committee report looking into protecting creative industries. John Whittingdale MP, the chair of the Committee — and also a non-executive director at Audio Network, an online music catalogue — noted that Google manages to remove other illegal content. 'Google and others already work with international law enforcement to block for example child porn from search results and it has provided no coherent, responsible reason why it can't do the same for illegal, pirated content,' he said."

Just filter out every mention of UK Members of Parliament and their policies from your search results for, say, 28 days, and see how keen the censorious, self-aggrandizing, cockwombles are on compulsory filtering after that.

Child abuse and piracy are not comparable. Child abuse is human depravity pushed to such an extreme that is justifiable to use it as a reason to defy common sense. Piracy is simply deviation from the rule of law - it does not warrant ubiquitous censorship of the kind that is being proposed.

The problem with their argument is that it is impossible to determine what is piracy and what isn't. You can't block every.mp3 on thepiratebay: some musicians purposefully put their work up there. You can't determine it by file name: many artists use the same names for songs as existing songs...

You can look at illegal child porn images and instantly know that they're illegal, but you can't just look at a file and know either way if its illegal or not

I guess it depends on where you live, in my country it's a civil offence. Not illegal though. Then again I've long since come to the conclusion that Cicero [wikipedia.org] was right on the subject of "laws being made, to simply criminalize the population" to paraphrase. What's funny, is that people think this is new...except when it's not.

I'm not convinced that possession of "pirated" content is illegal. How can they tell whether a particular file is pirated or not unless they can prove exactly where you obtained those bits from and that the person distributing it did not have the right to distribute it?

Also, how can they police the cases where someone legally ripped a CD they owned and then managed to lose their CD? Are those bits legal or illegal?

cases where someone legally ripped a CD they owned and then managed to lose their CD? Are those bits legal or illegal?

Those bits are illegal, you dirty, filthy pirate!

In all seriousness, there was a story on this a couple years ago & while the law is insane, the files would be illegal. Oh, and the guy that stole the CD would face less punishment if you were both punished. Again, insane.

But you cannot determine whether a particular file is pirated. See the fiasco at the Hugo Award ceremony when an automatic anti-piracy device cut of the streaming coverage because they were playing copyrighted music - which they had licensed. Child porn is illegal at all times. A music file or film may be legal or not, depending on circumstances. iTunes distributes copyrighted music: should it be blocked? Co can I tell the difference between iTunes and jTunes, its pirate cousin?

No, it isn't. Copyright infringement is only a crime when done on a commercial scale. For personal use it is a civil offence, but one that is widely tolerated (e.g. for time shifting, format shifting etc.)

Note also that this is alleged pirate material. If Google is going to be forced to act on all allegations by blocking content then I'm alleging that all government websites infringe my copyright. We already know that there is no consequence for repeated fraudulent allegations.

> You can look at illegal child porn images and instantly know that they're illegal

Oh, if only the world were so simple (even better would be a big red button I could push to eliminate all child abuse). Unfortunately, every jurisdiction has a particular age threshold which it uses to define "child porn" and so, unless you have some kind of superpower which I have never heard about, you could never be certain if an image had a (for example) 17.9999 year old child versus an 18.0001 year old adult. Even pro [wikipedia.org]

You can look at illegal child porn images and instantly know that they're illegal, but you can't just look at a file and know either way if its illegal or not

Determining if an image is child porn is not as easy as you make it seem. In fact, a lot of people get caught up in child porn laws doing stuff both parties consent to.

E.g., if a parent posts a photo of their baby on Facebook - is that child porn? If they were dressed in only a diaper? For a LOT of child porn definitions, this actually counts.

Or what happens today - sexting. Teens send pics of themselves in sexual positions. By practically all definitions, that's child porn. And many a teen have ended up snarled because the images fit that definition perfectly, despite both parties being of similar age and equally consenting. Heck, even if it's photos of themselves it can still count.

Determining when a particular image is child porn or not is not simple at all. Of course, it's somewhat easier in that a site that specializes in child porn images generally won't be used by teens sexting each other, but still. You also end up with sites like 4chan and reddit where they may have questionable images...

It is not an impossible task. It is a difficult one. But we're fundamentally simply talking about two data analysis tasks. One is visual data, the other is textual data... and some checksums. Someone who can reasonably take on the former ought to be able to take a serious stab at the latter. Google doesn't want to, because they fear they will be forced to; probably true.

It *is* an impossible task because while *all* child pornography is illegal - no exceptions - redistribution of copyrighted contents is illegal when the right owner didn't consent to it and legal when he did. It's the same thing as with photos of people - in some jurisdictions, you're only allowed to publish photos of people who consented to it (with perhaps some exceptions), but how do you divine the presence or absence of consent from the photo itself?

It is not an impossible task. It is a difficult one. But we're fundamentally simply talking about two data analysis tasks. One is visual data, the other is textual data... and some checksums. Someone who can reasonably take on the former ought to be able to take a serious stab at the latter. Google doesn't want to, because they fear they will be forced to; probably true.

What is the license for 123d56.iso? Are its content copyrighted? If it is copyrighted, does it's license permit this particular use case,

Even trained federal agents can't seem to tell the difference, and you expect an automated algorithm can? How exactly do you tell the difference between an advance copy posted to a blog by the artist themselves and an advance copy illegally leaked to a blog by someone else? The difference between kiddy porn and pirated content is that kiddy porn is always illegal. The exact same.mp3 file on the exact same server could be illegal today and legal tomorrow if the guy hosting it goes and asks for permission.

But think how much it would cost to try to create and implement such system? It's a logical step - if Google can't do it, let's find some contractor company who will do it for us. Oh, the owner of this company is a nephew of a said MP? Well, it's a strange coincidence, of course!

And, after all, we can always change law back after several years of abusing this broken system.

Okay a more concrete example. Would you consider censoring this very famous photo that appears in this Wikipedia article (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phan_Thi_Kim_Phuc). The photo meets all the mechanical criteria for a child abuse photo. Sure, it should be easy to put exceptions for such famous images into your child porn recognition algorithm, but this would mean erecting a prude's verion of the Great Firewall, crewed by gatekeepers who decide whether it's okay for the masses to see a controversial image.

That's basically how content filtering is currently done by major corporations. They give a bunch of third world "consultants" a big list of what's OK and what isn't and just feed them images to select if they're violations or not.

This would work for famous images or images that have a certain similarity threshold to them. New images would have to be vetted. So you need to censor the news so that only photos of fully clothed and smiling children can be seen.

A photo of a bloodied child is not illegal no matter what the cause. Sexualized imagery is clearly what's being discussed, as that's all that's illegal. And it's made even easier by laws in many jurisdiction stating that anything that looks like a child is illegal, even if they're actually 30 years old and just underdeveloped; even if it's a cartoon or digital rendering.

I still don't think these are usually machine-recognized yet (I believe the usual system is a bunch of third-worlders sitting in front of m

Child pornography is quite obvious without further investigation, copyright can be very complex and right can be claimed by a lot of people. The system can also easily abuse to remove perfectly legal content. But seems that UK MP like to compare pears and apples.... (or that they don't have a clue about what they are talking about)

* Female parent takes a photo of her child naked in the bath as some kind of happy memory, which she then uses to embarass him in front of his first girlfriend or whatever when looking at a family album (heck, who doesn't have parents like that?)* Drawings classify in the UK (which is something I don't agree with), which bans a lot of Japanese stuff (I can have sex with a 16-year-old girl, but can't have a drawing of a 17-year-ol

* Female parent takes a photo of her child naked in the bath as some kind of happy memory, which she then uses to embarass him in front of his first girlfriend or whatever when looking at a family album (heck, who doesn't have parents like that?)* Drawings classify in the UK (which is something I don't agree with), which bans a lot of Japanese stuff (I can have sex with a 16-year-old girl, but can't have a drawing of a 17-year-old anime character naked)* 16-year-old takes a photo of his 16-year-old girlfriend naked

Real child abuse is abhorrant, but might not be easily recongizable either.

Say, if a six-year-old got punched in the face by another six-year-old to the point where it left a bruise. I'm sure you'd have people whispering that his father did it or something.

Your point about intent and effect is entirely valid...except that the question here is not about how you would define "child porn," but how the law does. And under the law, all of the examples you describe are classified as child porn. This is a problem, yes, but it's not relevant to the current argument. Google must adhere to the law, and they do.

The law specifies nothing of the kind in any jurisdiction that I'm aware of - in the first case, without any sexual intent, local law is in sync with common sense and would not define that as child porn. You also appear to assuming that "the law" is constant, whereas definitions of child porn will vary from region to region.

Child porn is illegal to own. Pirated content is not.Sharing child porn is a criminal offense. Sharing pirated content is a civil offense.Even if google blocked it people would use a different search engine to find it. Stop playing whack-a-mole and do something constructive.

Detection of copyrighted material is also problematic in that it is not always readily apparent whether a particular entity has the legal right to distribute certain works and what does or does not constitute fair use and/or legal distribution. The works themselves are not illegal.

Why, we could completely block organizing efforts for those political parties that are advocate independence for parts of the UK: How do you like that, Sinn Fein, Plaid Cymru, and Scottish Nationalists? And then maybe get rid of those pesky Green parties, and then the Liberal Democrats too, just to be on the safe side.

Child porn can be identified without input from the content creator (looking at content is all that's needed), piracy cannot, you need to ask the content creator if it's piracy, and real piracy will attempt to hide who is the content creator to make that process difficult (and often the content creator will lie, we've seen this happen many times over on youtube where a big network steals some youtube content and then send them a takedown request for posting the content that the network decided to steal).

One is a crime against "the innocent" (I know, I know - think about the children!), while the other is unauthorized use of the commercial properties of specific businesses. It is reasonable to expect that the more disseminated and prolific child pornography is, the more children would be abused in the creation of more images and video. Thus by directly fighting child pornography, Google is protecting children. On the other hand, when it comes to pirated material, the only supposed (and I say "supposed" b

Exactly.This is like saying that because the SWAT and the FBI handle situations involving murder and hostages, that those departments should be more than capable of finding my lost kitten.Then proceeding to complain that they are not doing so.

What a surprise. Start with the slam-dunk of getting them to ban CP (After all if you don't agree it should be banned you must be a pedo sympathiser) , then turn round and say "Well you can block that illegal content, what about this?"
What next, demand Google block sites of banned political parties? Disallow all dissenting opinions? Silence religions you don't like? This is why we shouldn't have allowed the thin end of the wedge in in the first place. Give centralised control an inch and it'll take a mile.

How can I use Google to access pirated content? Google can stop indexing torrent sites, I guess, but a link to a torrent file is not automatically an index of copyright infringement (the Humble Bundle site would be blocked for example, as well as several Linux distros), and I don't think you can hold Google liable for the content hosted on third party sites. And once you create a blacklist of "torrent sites" then other mechanisms kick in, distributed tracking, magnet links, links exchanged on forums, on mailing lists, via sneakernet. What Google could do is to tell this guy "Give us a list of sites to block, backed by a judge's signature, and well'exclude them from our search results. But you will be held liable for any error in the supplied list, and it will be your duty to keep it up to date".

I'm not entirely fond of where the internet is heading these days but at the same I do understand the never-ending battle against the various crapmeisters and scammers that ruin the internet experience.

But why can't they also turn this question around: shouldn't content providers be required to make their content available at fair market prices in all regions to benefit from this type of law?

Mission creep. It always happens. First it's to prevent "child porn" or "terrorism". Then someone gets a bright idea - "but we can get x this way too!". And then someone else wants to use it for their pet agenda. What you end up with is police in body armor and assault rifles storming your house to confiscate files in a civil (not even criminal!) case, Kim Dotcom style.

It's an indexing&search engine for cryin' out loud, not a censoring body (thankfully). Censorship falls into government territory, they should censor and block sites if they can, not force the censorship tasks onto a company. I do not want to understand why these - and other similar - people can't fathom what they're dealing with. Derisorily ineffective my a**. They are pretty effective in what they do, which is provide results for your queries. They might want to actually regulate search engines though laws, but they wouldn't like the backlash from the people, so they seem to try to force the task onto the companies (especially Google, go figure).

"The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers." The second, let's deal with all the idiot politicians.

Doesn't the ability to comprehensively search for such things as child abuse photos OR pirated software aid the authorities in tracking it down and stopping it at the sources, just as much as it aids someone trying to download it?

No ships have been illegally seized, not a single cutlass has been brandished. There has been no disturbance of the lawful transfer of goods from one entity to another. No one is being held for ransom.

Violating a licensing "agreement" involves no theft of moneys, nor theft of tangibles, nor theft of services. Making and distributing an unlicensed copy of software, a book, a movie, or music may in some cases reduce the potential for future sales, but that is not a reduction in current value. It only affects speculative value. That is not nice, and there should probably be some legal protection against it, but it is not theft.

Until the legislators who are attempting to write laws start using English words appropriately, there can be no good laws written to cover this new economic activity. Appropriating verbiage from maritime law because "piracy" sounds so menacing is bullshit, plain and simple. Perhaps those who are misusing the word so much should be sent to the waters off Somalia to learn what it means.

There is a difference in how it is illegal. No, I did not write "how illegal it is", read the sentence again.

With child porn, the content itself is illegal. No discussions, end of story. With piracy, the same content can be illegal to download from one site, and legal to download from another site. Because the content doesn't matter, whether or not somebody has permission to distribute matters.

I have downloaded a game called Portal. First I downloaded the Windows version from The Pirate Bay. About a month a

I'm glad to know that the MP equates downloading a song with viewing pictures of child rape. Since the content providers are pushing the MP on this, one can only assume they share the view that downloading songs is more serious than child rape, too.

Okay first of all when google tries to eliminate child porn, they have the assistance of the police who in general are trying their best to eliminate this content because we've deemed this sort of content less than legal. I think most would agree this is a clean directive and relatively simple to understand.

When it comes to media organizations such as RIAA, it's pretty obvious they don't care too much about the music, people or privacy. All they care about is making money from the system. This results in them blanketing everyone with lawsuits including themselves and folks who are completely innocent.

If the police were like this it would be like them shooting everyone in the building to catch a single criminal because somehow that's a much better idea that actually doing your job correctly. This is the key difference between google looking for child porn and looking for pirated media. The organizations they need to co-operate with operate entirely differently.

It starts out protecting the children, then it moves to protecting content authors. Then it moves to protecting government officials from negative political speech. Then it moves to protecting criminals from journalists reporting about their actions. Where does it end? You might as well just take down the internet and block everything.

Pornographic pictures of children when seen can be objectively judged as child porn and easily filtered. If you see it, it's Illegal, and filter it. Save the hash- if you see the hash again, immediately block it.

Copyrighted content has to be judged if the person distributing it has clearances to distribute it. If you see a stream of a TV show, how do you know instantly (and automatically) that it's illegal? Even if you've found an illegal instance, you can't automatically block all subsequent instances as they may be Fair use, or authorized IE: song used as background on a commercial. Since it contains a copyrighted song, should google block it from YouTube automatically, even though the car company that posted the video has paperwork giving them clearance?

It's not easy to block copyright infringements without blocking valid uses. There is no valid use of Child Porn under the law.

If computers were able to detect copyright infringement, then there wouldn't be any DRM, or if there was DRM, nobody would have a problem with how it worked, and so there wouldn't be enough infringement for anyone to want to block.

If computers were able to detect copyright infringement, then HBO's DMCAbot wouldn't be sending takedown notices to Google for half of the pages on the web that use the word "boardwalk" or "thrones" somewhere in their text.

But computers aren't able to detect copyright infringment, and to date, every single attempt to have them try to do it, has resulted in over-the-top comedic failure that was deployed thirty years before it was ready.

Nobody's computer ever went to law school and learned the difference between infringing and non-infringing uses. Geez, ask experts whether or an H.P. Lovecraft story is still under copyright, and you can get two different answers. And you want computers to accurately identify each work, know its publication history, know whether or not its distribution is authorized, understand the nature of a use asnd its effect on the market, and then have the smarts to put all the facts together and come up with "infringing" vs "non-infringing"?

Tell you what. If I ever get a message from Google about DMCA-blocked search result that isn't absurd bullshit, or if I ever hear about a DRM scheme that doesn't prevent innocent noninfringing uses, then the idea may start to have some credibility. Until then, seriuously asking for Google to identify copyright infringement, is like seriously asking your Honda dealer where the lot with the flying cars is.

Creation and possession of child porn £300 fine and 6 months suspended sentence.
Illegally downloading said child porn without the copyright holder permission - 10 years for each file and a max fine of $250,000 per image. Copyright is theft! The crux is - Copyright is a civil matter; but they've turned it into a criminal one.

I know right? Why use our brains when we "think" of the children? No need to have sentences that mesh with the crime. After all, why should there be any difference between the sentences for downloading a couple of images into your cache and kidnapping, violently raping, torturing, and then murdering a hundred children? I mean, that's practically the same thing right?

From blocking things that are illegal everywhere to thing are illegal in some places.

The reason why child porn is blocked is because the person pictured is the underage victim of a crimeand the creation of child porn is a mala in se offense (illegal because its bad in of itself) because its the distribution of the product of child abuse.

The right to enforce copyright should lie with the copyright holder not the state. Not all copyright holders choose to exercise their rights or have constructively abandoned their rights (aka Abandonware), something the law has not been updated to reflect.

Personally I still get all of my content legally (generally via rental now, ie LoveFilm and Spotify), but if the industries keep acting the way they are, they kind of get what they deserve.

You can't keep ignoring reality either. I have no idea of the real figures, but the vast majority of my friends watch TV shows and listen to music illegally. It kind of sucks, but it's how people are. Expecting everyone to ignore free sources of entertainment is slightly like expecting everyone to use film cameras when digital is available. Or expecting people to go into a dark room full of strangers just to watch a new movie. If they want to keep making money, they should embrace change, rather than fight it tooth and nail.

Government protection for a business model that's failing (for whatever reason) is a very slippery slope.

(Before answering, consider that the music industry's golden years were when people used to freely record music which was being broadcast by radio...)

No business should expect that profits will always go upwards to infinity. Every market will plateau. Some markets will collapse. Some will no longer be able to support a huge amount of middlemen (which is who's inventing the figures for 'losses' by the mus

Government protection for a business model that's failing (for whatever reason) is a very slippery slope.

(Before answering, consider that the music industry's golden years were when people used to freely record music which was being broadcast by radio...)

No business should expect that profits will always go upwards to infinity. Every market will plateau. Some markets will collapse. Some will no longer be able to support a huge amount of middlemen (which is who's inventing the figures for 'losses' by the music industry, despite all independent studies to the contrary).

Actually, that would be Government protection for a campaign donation scheme from a business model that's failing.

Snark aside, you have it absolutely correct. No one has as a "right" to your work. In the real world, however, that only works as long as you don't ever let your creations out of your head. As soon as you casually whistle that catchy little tune you wrote, in earshot of someone else - Game over (potentially). The universe now owns it, and you can go suck eggs.

For better or worse, compensating the author of a creative work very much depends on the charitable, even grateful, feelings those works inspire in their audience. I want my favorite bands to produce more, and do my best to get money to them; on the flip side of that, I loathe my favorite bands' labels, and wouldn't stop to piss on their execs in I found them dying of thirst in the Sahara. This leads to a bit of cognitive dissonance, obviously, which I personally resolve by doing my best to compensate the artists directly (concerts, merchandise, direct sales, etc) while shamelessly pirating anything actually released by the parasites that "own" them.

I take it you've never read the constuitution to see why there's such a thing as copyright in the US in the first place? The whole purpose is to encourage artists and writers to produce things so they will go into the public domain. Originally it was only 14 years.

Who don't you explain why we should not have all the stuff we want for free?

It worked fine for at least 50.000 years of human history, artists, musicians etc happily continued creating "culture" without getting payed for it 70 years after their deaths.

You can have all of the stuff you want for free. On the other hand, if you want somebody else to produce it for you, they don't have to produce it for you for free. But, you, yourself, can do it for free.

As for the rest of your post, at least since the Middle Ages and probably long before that, the arts were supported by the wealthy and the artisans could only "perform" with the permission of their sponsor. Back then, the artisans were more like indentured servants. As long as they pleased the king, the

I'm a proud pirate. I think the whole system is corrupt and indefensible. I think there is a role for IP, but compared to where we are now I think we'd be better off scrapping it all together. I have been known to actually buy stuff, but only when it saves me time over piracy. Sadly, it is often more convenient to pirate (especially software and video).

Personally, I think most artists are lazy fucks who think that doing work for about 3 months should entitle them to a lifetime of luxury. I prefer to support people who actually play music. You know, concerts.

Nope, haven't bough music in years. But I have been to more than a few concerts.

Actually, no, the heyday of music sales was also the heyday of Napster. Music sales drops directly correlate to (A) the lowered number of premiere band and album launches and (B) the music industry's lack of ability to forced-obsolescence much of their product compared to past years. Tapes wore out; Vinyl required great care. The music industry enjoyed a massive boost with CDs largely because they could resell the same old crap, plus all their "new acts", on CD and people would actually buy the various greatest-hit collections and album re-releases on CD because their old copies were degrading and not playing back at the same quality.

The nice thing about digital, though, is it doesn't degrade. And people have learned about transferring things device to device, and their RIGHT to do so.

There's also the nice rise of the single again, with people able to buy just the TRACKS they want rather than having to buy a shitty-ass album to get the one track they liked that was way overplayed on the radio from this summer's one-hit wonder. Great for consumers, lousy for coke-addled music execs who counted on selling CD albums at $19.99 forever.

The music industry is in decline because all they are producing is Biebers, Gagas, and twerking bimbos rather than elevating the best new acts. They do this because they can get the Biebers, Gagas, and twerking bimbos cheap and sign them to a long term contract early (much like Disney's "this is how we sell sex to 5 year old girls" tools, the Jonas Brothers, or the former trajectory of most Boy Bands).

What it would take for the music industry to stop the decline is to start producing a better product again. "Piracy" did not cause the Biebers, Gagas, etc. The relentless drive of one-hit wonder crap albums, tweeny-pop boybands, twerking bimbos, Lesbos Like Bieber, and on and on caused people to be leery of buying product sight-unseen.

Alec (from 2012, in 2012): Someone just shorted $3.5 million of shares in Exotrol stock.
Kiera (from 2077, in 2012): Shorted? What does that mean?
Alec: It's complicated. But basically, they bet against the company being profitable, successful...
Kiera: Is that legal?
Alec: Strangely, yes.